By healers I mean curators, there's a longstanding joke that spanish speaking hive users call curation healing due to translation.
I wanted to tackle something different today, something I've been vocal about in the past a lot and "chased away" some people for and probably gotten a lot of enemies and whoever disagreed with anything else I do to join in.
Claude's been pretty good at looking at things, it seems to understand based on the votes, patterns, timings, etc, what changes regular buddies who like voting on each other vs systematic vote trading for maximized gain, aka 100%+ selfvoting.
While these tools will be hidden from public starting out, we will make use of them in ocd to check on things as it may alter the way we decide to curate certain authors or to not curate at all. The new public nominations have changed a lot of things compared to community nominations in the past, those had a lot more trust in them and seldom was there active misuse. Thus now we have to go back to the roots if you will and look at things even deeper.
For instance, there was a case the other week where a community that was already semi-well rewarded (in terms of hive, not $ obviously) and they understood the restrictions and limitations we've set aside for public nominations and potentially the reasoning behind it, i.e. to not overreward authors. So what they started doing is to nominate posts for our vote before they landed the usual bigger votes they'd been receiving afterwards. So to a voter deciding if ocd should vote on the post it'd look like the post was good, there was some engagement, etc, but they would seldom check hours after how that same post ended up in pending rewards. Meaning, they'd purposely nominate posts for our votes before potentially at their own will, casting bigger votes the post would've received anyway to maximize rewards on those posts.
People can become quite clever in terms of gaming things when there's rewards to be had. While we've applied another metric to look out for such instances, I think it's fair to also disqualify that community from nominations in the future.
We do also disqualify a lot of authors on the get-go, either our own blacklist, other public blacklists or some more intricate ones that not everyone may agree with, but that's just our preference and I don't think others have much say in who we vote and don't. While obviously this may not be the right time to add even more automatic restrictions and nitpicking since the userbase is small, it does beg the question to see what others are doing and getting themselves involved in. Thus we're building some more tools for curators to be able to check before they decide to vote for things, i.e. how big of a vote or if they ought to vote it at all.
One of those things is vote trading.
Systematic vote trading where you're utilizing autovotes or even manual votes to always only vote for people who upvote you back, preferably the same vote strength and preferably so you get all your ten votes returned on your one daily post is the thing we're looking at mostly. We understand people vote for friends, we're all human and have preferences, biases, etc. But to go out of your way to concentrate your votes so hard only on quid-pro-quo activity goes against proof of brain/curation as it centralized the inflation only on your group rather than utilizing it to distribute stake where it is deserved and towards newcomers. These activities usually rely on others not doing the same, because if we all did the same we'd end up like the trending pages of steemit where it's mainly services voting on delegators posts thus it is always the same people up there, whether their content is consumed or not, whether they put in any effort into it or not, whether they engage with the community or not, etc.
Talking about that, we also started looking into services and the numbers are quite staggering to say the least. While our scope is still small, we only added a few accounts off the top of our heads, it says a lot. This list is of a few accounts where we only checked if they vote for users delegating to them:
I'm removing the names in this post cause it's not about that. Here's another list that also takes into account token holdings of the same project.
To give you a comparison to 
Only 6% of votes land on users that delegate, meaning artists/other posts by users posting in the community, whether they delegate or hold the token shouldn't matter when we curate stuff, right?
Either way, I'm not trying to stir drama or call users out for things, I do think some of these projects have for better or worse caused people to remain active on chain and post daily if we ignore that their stake is almost never used on new users or more deserving users or that posting daily and knowing you have a guaranteed vote waiting for you may degrade your effort/quality or how you treat the community, etc. It is however something worth talking about and looking back.
I'm glad that there's still a lot of stake that doesn't utilize these services for their own gain but empowers actual curation projects that may or may not do more than simply curate.
We at ocd do however think that longterm this kind of activity is hurtful to the ecosystem and left ignored or even encouraged by ignoring what the authors are enabling to drop more curation on top of it may only grow these project's returns and the authors enabling them in the same go.
Thus we'll be more careful in the near future to not curate authors who participate in these kind of services and other voting that isn't natural/genuine.
We may open this up to others in the future, maybe when doing a lot of RPC calls isn't as focused on the few servers running these days, you can think of it similar to hivetasks.com but hopefully more intricate with some AI agent pointing things out in more detail and logic. For now however we're just building these for our curators and letting them scan specific users they come in contact with only to keep the calls on the low side.
